Ulta Beauty has been flying high and amongst the numerous aspects at play is its loyalty program and subsequent database, which chief executive officer Dave Kimbell often highlights during earnings presentations.

Nevertheless it wasn’t all the time this manner, as he told Carol Hamilton, the group president of acquisitions for L’Oréal USA, during a wide-ranging conversation between the 2 executives.

“We had some work to do on it. It’s possible you’ll remember, we had two different programs. They were complicated and we didn’t have the info organized. Our team in our stores specifically didn’t really understand the importance so we worked hard to take a position in that and drive that a part of our business going forward before because we like loyalty. That’s vital, right?” he said of the beginnings of the loyalty program soon after the corporate was founded.

“We wanted people to be loyal to Ulta Beauty, but we also wanted to grasp their behaviors to dive in deeper,” he continued. “We had the chance to essentially understand consumer beauty enthusiast purchase behavior higher than anybody. So we moved down that path and certainly one of the most important things we did was get our teams enthusiastic about it in our stores to grasp the importance to see the worth that it added.”

That work has paid off with 40 million members of the loyalty program called Ultamate Rewards and 95 percent of sales going through it, while the info trends have led to the event of programs corresponding to it retail media network, UB Media, to supply brands addressable promoting leveraging its Ultamate Rewards members.

“It’s been a fantastic journey, but like I said, we’re not done and we’re going proceed to take a position,” added Kimbell.

Away from analytics, Hamilton went on to ask Kimbell what his secret weapon was
for really understanding the buyer as an individual, not as data only, to which his answer was his army of store associates.

“We now have over 50,000 store associates,” he said. “They’re a large source of insight beyond the info to grasp what they see each day as they’re engaging in all different guests across the country.”

There’s also a Beauty Board made up of 10,000 beauty enthusiasts that Ulta reaches out to almost every week asking questions, to grasp not only what’s happening with beauty, but what’s happening of their lives.

The latter has been particularly helpful in the course of the global coronavirus pandemic and likewise the present period of economic uncertainty, in keeping with Kimbell.

“We ask them questions on a regular basis and we actually increased that in the course of the pandemic once we wanted to grasp not only what was happening in makeup but what was happening of their lives and about what’s ahead of them, what’s the economic outlook, how are they connecting with others in a time of uncertainty and so we proceed to try this,” he said. “Most recently with the economic certainty what’s the role of inflation, how are they desirous about it.…It actually helps us understand our strategy.”